> I need references of feature films telling about poverty.
wrote   > Mari Maasilta
                > University of Tampere
 
 
"El Norte" would, in my opinion, fit that category. Here is the
Cinemania '94 discussion by Roger Ebert of the movie:
 
 
El Norte
US (1983): Drama
Rated R, Color, 139 minutes
Available on videocassette
Academy Award Nominee
 
Roger Ebert Review
4 stars
 
Cast & Credits
 
Zaide Silvia Gutierrez          Rosa
David Villalpando                       Enrique
Ernesto Gomez Cruz              Father
Alicia del Lago                         Mother
Trinidad Silva                          Monty
 
Directed by Gregory Nava and produced by Anna Thomas. Screenplay by
Nava and Thomas.
 
Review
 
From the very first moments of El Norte, we know that we are in the
hands of a great movie. It tells a simple story in such a romantic
and poetic way that we are touched, deeply and honestly, and we know
we will remember the film for a long time. The movie tells the story
of two young Guatemalans, a brother and sister named Rosa and
Enrique, and of their long trek up through Mexico to el Norte_the
United States. Their journey begins in a small village and ends in
Los Angeles, and their dream is the American Dream. But El Norte
takes place in the present, when we who are already Americans are
not so eager for others to share our dream. Enrique and Rosa are not
brave immigrants who could have been our forefathers, but two young
people alive now, who look through the tattered pages of an old Good
Housekeeping for their images of America. One of the most
interesting things about the film is the way it acknowledges all of
the political realities of Latin America and yet resists being a
"political" film. It tells its story through the eyes of its heroes,
and it is one of the rare films that grants Latin Americans full
humanity. They are not condescended to, they are not made to
symbolize something, they are not glorified, they are simply
themselves. The movie begins in the fields where Arturo, their
father, is a bracero_a pair of arms. He goes to a meeting to protest
working conditions and is killed. Their mother disappears. Enrique
and Rosa, who are in their late teens, decide to leave their village
and go to America. The first part of the film shows their life in
Guatemala with some of the same beauty and magical imagery of
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. The middle
section shows them going by bus and foot up through Mexico, which is
as harsh on immigrants from the South as America is. At the border
they try to hire a "coyote" to guide them across, and they finally
end up crawling to the promised land through a rat-infested drainage
tunnel. The final section of the film takes place in Los Angeles,
which they first see as a glittering carpet of lights, but which
quickly becomes a cheap motel for day laborers, and a series of jobs
in the illegal, shadow job market. Enrique becomes a waiter. Rosa
becomes a maid. Because they are attractive, intelligent, and have a
certain naive nerve, they succeed for a time, before the film's sad,
poetic ending. El Norte is a great film, one of 1983's best, for two
different kinds of reasons. One is its stunning visual and musical
power; the approach of the film is not quasi-documentary, but
poetic, with fantastical images that show us the joyous hearts of
these two people.
 
The second reason is that this is the first film to approach the
subject of "undocumented workers" solely through their eyes. This is
not one of those docu-dramas where we half-expect a test at the end,
but a film like The Grapes of Wrath that gets inside the hearts of
its characters and lives with them. The movie was directed by Gregory
Nava and produced by Anna Thomas, who wrote it together. It's been
described by Variety as the "first American independent epic," and
it is indeed an epic film made entirely outside the studio system by
two gifted filmmakers (their credits include The Confessions of
Amans, which won a Gold Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival, and The
Haunting of M, one of my favorite films from 1979). This time, with
a larger budget and a first-rate cast, they have made their
breakthrough into the first ranks of filmmaking.
 
"Copyright (c) 1993, Microsoft Corp."
 
Best.
=====================================================================
Christophe Ramandt,
 
Department of Communication Studies -- Rhetorical Inquiry
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA
 
[log in to unmask] -- http://pubweb.acns.nwu.edu/~cramandt/home0001.htm
 
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